About Parsley

Firstly, a minor update Alpha 1.51 has been released which fixes some bugs that were found:

Fixed missing Coin Collecting Album from Collector’s Store

Fixed missing Bachelor Of Arts and Philosophy from University

Fixed withholding tax not taking into account inflation

Fixed yearly tax calculation not taking into account inflation

Now, onto the topic of Alpha 1.6. There are several steps to take before we can have a functioning Commodities/Stock Market.

The first step is adding charting functionality to the game. I already have the ability to store historical price data from previous features, now it was just a matter of presenting that information to the player. Here’s a look at the new charts for economic data in action:

I can also use this to show the player’s progress. When you click on the Life Goals buttons now, you’ll be able to see charts showing your progress towards each goal.

In the future, I’ll be able to use this same functionality to display stock price history and other information.

Secondly, the Statements window received a face-lift and is divided into two parts – Personal and World. Personal statements are things like your Income Statement and Tax Return that are already in the game. World statements will include information on interest rates, economic growth, real estate prices, stock prices and more.

You will notice that World statements are locked behind a paywall. A subscription to Financial Dimes is required, which has been added to the usual subscriptions window. This is so new players aren’t overwhelmed by the amount of information thrown at them.

Once you subscribe, you will get access to information to help you make informed decisions. For example, the Economic Indices charts will help you to determine whether it’s cheaper to rent or buy a home. Rent prices are affected by the Inflation Index, whereas house prices are now affected by their own Real Estate Index. Depending on which index is higher, renting can be more or less expensive than buying.

On a separate note, I got a bit carried away in the last update with adding random events. There were some events that affected your needs levels, and after play-testing I found they were a bit unfair. They took away from the pleasure of barely surviving the week using proper time management, which would happen naturally from time to time. About half of them will be removed in Alpha 1.6, but I’ll be keeping some funny events like coming last place in a beauty contest.

Also, I’m still thinking about ways to implement some automation of needs in the late game. I want to do it in an interesting and balanced way, and I prefer not to attempt it until I have a clear vision of what it looks like. It’s always on my mind though. Maybe one day I will have a flash of brilliance like I did with the Subscriptions and come up with something great!

Lots to talk about! Firstly, the Steam page for This Grand Life is up and there’s a new trailer to go along with it. I’ll be launching on Steam Early Access on 23rd October and aim for a full launch in the first half of next year. If you purchased on Itch.io, you will get a Steam key.

Alpha 1.5 includes the new theme feature and Comic Book collectibles discussed in the last article, new career paths, education courses, traits, random events, balance changes and more.

When adding new content, I try to keep things varied by using existing game mechanics in different ways. Two examples are the Law and Accounting careers.

For the Law career path, you start out as a Paralegal after you get your Law degree. When you have gained enough Law Experience, you get access to two further occupations. You can become a Legal Officer, which pays more. Or you can become a Community Lawyer, which has the unique mechanic of increasing your Happiness every time you work. The next tier up is the Corporate Lawyer, which requires the player to take the Bar Exam as a prerequisite. It pays a lot more money than either the Legal Officer or Community Lawyer.

The Accountant career path is different. In this career, you can start gaining Accounting Experience as a Payroll Clerk before you even get your degree. Once you have your degree, you can then become an Accountant. After that you take the CPA Exam to become a Certified Accountant, then finally complete a Diploma in Management course to become a Comptroller. So lots of courses to complete to reach the top of this career, but it pays extremely well.

In this update we’ll also have more random events. Some examples are stepping on chewing gum and having an old friend call you, which changes your needs slightly each week.

Next we have more traits. Here’s a short list of some of the new ones:

I’ve also made some slight adjustments to the Happiness need. One of the aims of the Happiness need is to kill off the player if they haven’t been managing their money properly. For example, if you can’t afford food then your Hunger need goes down the zero and then your Happiness need starts decreasing. However, this could also happen if the player wasn’t paying enough attention to the needs bar (even if they had plenty of money).

I didn’t want to punish the player too much for inattention. So I’ve significantly slowed down the rate of Happiness decrease when this happens. In practice, this means you will be less likely to go into a spiral of depression and ‘moping around’ by accident. It also means if you have run out of money, your journey to insanity will take slightly longer.

Finally, last time I mentioned the Commodities/Stock Market feature was in second place in our online poll. Well now it seems to have taken the lead by a large margin!

First on the list of new features is themes. Each location in the game now has a different colour theme to make them more distinct. The Fast Food location is gaudy and bright, while the high-end Restaurant is more subtle and classy.

Even the housing areas have their own theme. If you don’t like your home’s default colours, you can change it. Go to the Mall and buy Cans Of Paint, then go home and select ‘Paint Home’ to choose which theme you want. You can also do the same for any freelance businesses you own.

Next is Comic Book collecting. Comic Books are now available to help achieve your Possessions Life Goal, just like the other collectibles. Own much-loved classics like Startling Arachnid-Man and The Attractive Quartet. The rest are for you to discover.

Also, all the Collectible containers (Stamp Book, Jewellery Case, etc) have been moved into their own Collector’s Store and removed from the Mall.

There’s also two new subscriptions. The first is Jesse’s Jokes, which gives you jokes and observations about life, work and money every week. It’s not really useful, but it’s cheap and I thought it fit in well with the rest of the game. The second subscription is Generous Giving. This sets up a monthly charity donation that takes money from your bank account and increases your happiness. It’s very useful if you have enough money but haven’t achieved your Happiness Life Goal yet.

There’s other content coming as well, including new traits, more random events and two more career paths. Thanks to a recent spike in supporters, we’ll also be adding two new music tracks in the next version.

One of the surprising things in our online poll was a sudden increase in the votes for a Commodities/Stock Market, which is now in second place! I always wanted to add it, but wasn’t sure if players would want such a feature. I’ll be gradually working towards that over the coming months.

Alpha 1.4 is out and contains the new freelance/contractor business feature. I gave an introduction to this feature in the previous post here. Today, I’ll talk about some other changes surrounding this new feature.

The most recent transactions are now listed when you click on your main account balance. This is useful if you have multiple businesses and they start generating income/deducting expenses from your account. You can see where the money is going, whether it’s paying for wages or materials, etc.

Your own businesses can also be assigned a hotkey now, so you can quickly access it. Just click “Pin” on the business you want to hotkey, and select a number from the list. This is helpful if you want to check up on your business, accept any available jobs and assign workers to jobs. Then once you’re done, press the hotkey again to close the business window and get back to your life.

There’s a new subscription, the Businezz Biweekly which provides you with advanced tips on running a business.

Since you’re running a business, you also get tax deductions. For those that are unfamiliar with how it works, a tax deduction is a reduction in your taxable income mainly from expenses you incur from running the business. Any business expense is a tax deduction, so for example if you made $10000 from the business and spent $7000 on marketing, materials, etc then you would only be taxed on your $3000 profit. You can see your total business income and expenses on the income statement of each business.

You can also sell a business if you have had enough of being an entrepreneur. The final sale price is influenced by recent business profits, brand reputation and awareness, and a few other factors. Your business is considered a sole proprietorship, which means its profits or losses are added to your personal tax return each financial year (and you are taxed at your personal tax rate, not a business tax rate).

As mentioned last time, the base price for This Grand Life will be increasing after this weekend. So if you want it at the lower price, head over to Itch.io before Monday!

Remember you can still vote in the online poll for what you want to see next. More content is currently in the lead so I’ll be working on that for the next update.

This is a mid-to-late game feature, as the initial capital required to start a business can be quite high. For example to start a plumbing business, you need to pay startup fees, buy a plumber’s toolkit and plumbing supplies, and also be qualified with the right education. Marketing is also expensive, and you’ll have a hard time getting any jobs without it. However once you’ve established your brand, the potential profit is great if you can manage your business properly.

When you first start a business, you will probably be doing all the jobs yourself. Employees are expensive and need to be paid every week, regardless of whether there is work available for them. As you complete jobs successfully and on time, your reputation will grow and you will get more job offers. Once you start getting too many job offers, it’s time to think about hiring workers. When your business is well established, you can hire a manager to take care of everything and let the business run itself!

Every potential employee has a diligence rating. An employee with a high diligence will complete jobs for you faster, but in general will want higher pay. This is not always true though, and it might be worthwhile to fire a low diligence worker and hire a high diligence one if they are demanding the same pay. Potential workers are taken from the pool of preset names, so if you are supporting us at The Supervisor tier or higher your name might show up in this list.

I still need to do testing and add more business types before releasing this update. There’s a large amount of new systems implemented to make it work, so it will definitely not be compatible with previous saved games. Also once the update goes live, I’ll be removing The Student supporter tier which will bring the base price for This Grand Life to $10.

Finally, I’ve set up an online poll. Please vote to give me an idea on what you want to see more!

Alpha 1.3 of This Grand Life has been released. This version features an improved education system as discussed in the last post, and also a new scenario! Here’s a video summarising the changes:

The scenario is called “Sue Goes To University” and is about Sue Doku, a nerdy young adult about to start her Science degree at Stanford University. Speaking of which, Stanford is a new town you can play from the custom game menu. It’s similar to Tutorialville in that the town doesn’t contain all the locations that a proper city contains. The focus of the Stanford map is on the University itself.

The scenario also works as an extended tutorial for the education system. It goes through more features that you might not be aware of. There are also some special events that are only triggered when you play the scenario, like going Elf Spotting or attending CatCon.

Another change is the addition of preset goals on the custom game menu. You can click on the Preset Goals button and see a list of goals sorted by length of time taken. The shortest settings are a ‘Walk To The Bathroom’ while the longest ones are ‘Cross-Planetary Marathon’.

Of course you can still manually adjust your goals to whatever you like, although they will now default to ‘An Acceptable Life’ when you first start up the game.

I’m making some changes to the way education works to make it a more rewarding experience. Hopefully it will feel less like you are grinding towards a distant goal that’s still years away (like in real life). Here’s a summary video:

Courses at the Town Hall (Alcoholics Anonymous, First Aid, etc) will no longer contribute towards your Knowledge goal. I thought it didn’t really make sense to have someone who attends an Alcoholics recovery program gaining Knowledge, since someone without the Alcoholic trait would have no reason to attend.

Instead, there is now a new Library location. Here you can study interesting courses such as ‘Elf Spotting 101’, ‘Identifying Llama Droppings’ and more. They aren’t useful for your career, but they are cheaper and shorter to complete than a degree or diploma while still giving you Knowledge. If you only need a small amount of Knowledge to complete your Life Goal, these are a better alternative to the more serious courses.

Previously you only received Knowledge when you completed the entire course. Now it will be gained gradually while you study. There will still be a large boost to your Knowledge when you finish the course, but it won’t be as dramatic as before.

I’ve also added an Eat From Canteen action to the University and Trade School. Now you can eat while studying at the same place. However this change would have discouraged the player from attending the Burger Joint and Restaurant. To counteract this, eating from those places now also increases your Fun.

I’ve made a few changes to the reward tiers to hopefully provide better value to supporters.

Firstly, I noticed some people were happy to support us at the Worker tier, but had no interest in getting their name in the credits. So I thought, what could I offer instead?

One of the unique things about This Grand Life is the city maps you play on, which are created from real cities. I go through a special process to create them and it took two months to figure out how to do it.

I thought I could offer an insight into this process, so I wrote a manual describing how to create the game’s maps using satellite data. You can even follow the instructions to create your own home town!

The manual will be available to all Worker tier supporters and above.

Secondly, after a request I have added a tier called ‘The Manager’. In addition to the other stuff, it also gives you a custom portrait in the game of you, your friend or your pet. You get a high resolution version for your personal use as well.

That’s it for now. I’m still working on changes to the Education system, which I’ll talk more about next time.

Alpha 1.2 of This Grand Life has been released. There are two new major features. The first is Collectibles, which was shown in the previous video. The second is Subscription Services, which is demonstrated in the following video:

Subscriptions provide useful information and services that help you achieve your life goals. For example, the Lively Livin’ sub gives you a weekly tip on how to play the game. On the other end of the scale is the Grand Groceries sub, which delivers fresh groceries to your door every 4 weeks. It’s more expensive than buying from the Shopping Mall, but it means you won’t have to travel there every month to buy your own. There are currently 5 subscriptions in total and I’m still working on a few more.

Each subscription costs money, and the price increases with inflation. So you have to think about whether keeping a subscription is worth it. The Collector’s Corner subscription is useless if you’re not interested in buying collectibles, or have completed all your collections.

I’ve also updated the weekly summary panel, and now you can click on each goal to see a breakdown of your progress towards achieving that goal.

A new feature in the next version (1.2) of This Grand Life will be collectibles. I’ve made a video update demonstrating this feature:

To start a collection, firstly you have to purchase a container from the Shopping Mall. For example to start collecting Stamps, you need a Stamp Collecting Book. I found requiring purchasing a container was the best way to do it, as it allows the player to completely ignore collectibles if they’re not interested in it.

Once you have something to store collectibles, you can attend auctions at the Town Hall to start bidding on them.

If you win the auction, the item gets added to your collection. You can only have one of each collectible, even though there may be multiples of the same item up for auction. Each item has a different rarity and prices that reflect their rarity.

In total there are currently about $50k worth of collectible items, ranging from Doll, Coin, Stamp, Video Game and Jewellery Collections. They all contribute towards your possessions life goal, so they provide an alternative to buying Fridges and TVs in working towards that goal.